If you watch Furious Pete on YouTube, you’ll know that nothing gets him down for very long – not even his ongoing battle with cancer. “I’ve gone through a lot of dark moments in my life,” he told us during a visit to the What’s Trending office recently, “but I’ve also gone through a lot of really funky and cool moments.”

We’ve been following and cheering for the competitive eater and fitness guru over the last few months, so it was really cool to get a chance to talk to him about his new book Stay Hungry, now available on Amazon. The book talks about the highs and lows of his life and career, which has seen him become a Guinness World Record holder for competitive eating, embrace health and bodybuilding, and travel the world trying the most intense foods he can find.

Furious Pete told us that battling anorexia and depression as a teenager and being open about his experience was formative for how he approaches his online career today. “As soon as I started doing that, and started doing it on YouTube especially, I started getting a lot of positive feedback – I started getting a lot of people telling me how much I’m impacting their lives.”

He found that people rarely talk about eating disorders among men, because they assume it’s just a women’s issue – or they would rather ignore it. “I think it’s really important to talk about it, because people’s lives are on the line.” So when he was diagnosed with cancer, he made a point of being open about it with his viewers and doing whatever he could to inform people about what to expect.

“I live by two mottos in life,” he told us. “One is ‘Dedicated for Life,’ which meant that every single thing that I was doing, it doesn’t matter how long it would take, I would dedicate all my efforts towards it.”

The second motto is “Stay Hungry,” the title of his book. “What that means is that no matter how difficult things get, no matter how hard it is to achieve a certain goal or get to a certain place in life, as long as you really do stay hungry and want to achieve that, I truly feel you can.”